The Joker

LAKAS MEANS STRENGTH. What kind of strength it represents or means to exercise, you saw last Monday. Juan Flavier, a Lakas member who did not attend the Lakas meeting that day, put it this way. "Yabang ng dating, machong macho. Gagawin nila 'yon, sabi nila, even without the Senate. Kaso e, hindi pwede (They came on strong with a macho air. They were going to do it even without the Senate. The problem is, the law doesn't allow it)."

Flavier has got a point. But he forgets that neither GMA (President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) nor Fidel V. Ramos (FVR) nor Jose de Venecia (JDV) nor their ilk has shown herself or himself capable of being deterred by the law. On the contrary, they have repeatedly and consistently shown that they are above the law -- no, that they are the law -- and will use all their lakas to bend the world to their will. The problem is the senators? They will ignore the senators. The problem is the Senate? They will scrap the Senate.

Joker Arroyo is furious. The decision lies with the Senate, he says, not with Lakas. Well, that's what you get for playing a joker. If I recall right, he was the one who said in 2004 that it was better to vote for a corrupt president than an idiotic one because we can remedy corruption constitutionally by impeachment while we cannot remedy idiocy by any means. He did not know GMA. None of them did. There is no constitutional remedy there. The Constitution will be remedied before she is.

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And that's the problem my friend. Sabi ni Joker we have constitutional remedies to remove a corrupt president.

But what if the corrupt president doesn't want to play along and instead insists that THE CONSTITUTION IS THE PROBLEM, NOT HER, and that the old constitution needs to be removed raw and replaced with a new one?

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GMA justifies this by saying there is a pressing need for change. The people are tired of political noise and want to reform the political system. Hence, Charter change. She misses the point completely.

Of course, there is a pressing need for change. But she is wrong about what needs changing. We do not need to change the Charter, we just need to change her.

There is nothing wrong with the Charter, there is everything wrong with her. The Charter is genuine, the President is fake. Changing the Charter presumably because it is defective is like claiming when gold turns to dross at the touch of vinegar that the vinegar is fake, a joke wrongly attributed to the Moro peddler. There is nothing wrong with the vinegar, there is everything wrong with the gold. Change the gold, not the vinegar.

The Charter was made by commissioners who fought a dictatorship and distinguished themselves in various fields for their courage and probity. They crafted a Charter that sought to prevent a dictatorship from ever rising again, suffusing the fundamental law with the spirit of libertarianism and respect for human rights. Today's call for a new Charter is being led by a non-president who hid under the bed while others fought a brewing tyranny, who distinguished herself only by appearing in public with Cory Aquino on one side and Jaime Cardinal Sin on the other. She wants a Charter that will prevent democracy from ever breathing again, assigning the making of it to crooks, hustlers and blackguards who are pleased to call their party "strong."

The public is not tired of "political noise," the public is tired of GMA. And over these past weeks probably of FVR and JDV, too. Look at the surveys. No, just listen to your neighbors. They do not say that the overwhelming majority of Filipinos find the Charter defective, they say the overwhelming majority of Filipinos find their president defective. They do not say that the overwhelming majority of Filipinos want their Charter retired, they say the overwhelming majority want their president removed. They do not say the overwhelming majority of Filipinos want to change their government from presidential to parliamentary, they say the overwhelming majority of Filipinos want to change their government from fake to genuine.

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